I'm using a Scan Dual II to scan slide films and depending on the particular slide I sometimes need to do quite a bit of fiddling with the colours and curves to get the scan's colours to look like those on the original slide (mainly Fuji Sensia II). I'm curious for those of you who use Vuescan with the Scan Dual II to scan slides what you use for scan settings:

Right now I am using colour balance=NONE, auto exposure, gamma 2.2, image brightness=1, and sRGB mainly because it seems to give me acceptable results most of the time. I am importing them into Photoshop 6 and doing most of my colour correction there. Any advice?

I wish I could help, Felix, as you helped me in deciding on the Scan Dual. However, I have had no luck installing Vuescan - it just won't do it. I've even contacted the author and that was no help at all.

I've had a Scan Dual II for about 4 weeks and use it with VueScan almost exclusively. I know I use "white balance", autoexposure and image brightness=1.2, but I can't remember the rest of the settings and I'm not at home at the moment - when I get home I'll check and add another post.

I only ever import the results of a scan into Photoshop if there's a need for retouching for a dust mark or suchlike, as I find Vuescan does things better than I can for me in terms of colors and brightness.

I install it, then upon running it, my system locks and I must alt-ctrl-del and close out Vuescan. I'm using the latest version. It is interesting because I was using a previous version from around Oct, and it works great! No problems at all. But none of the newer versions will. I want to register it, but with this kind of problem, I have doubts. I'm using Windows 98.

Ok, I don't have the same scanner but I always use white balance which works very well most of the time.

That aside I only ever change brightness in the range 1.2 to 1.6 or 1.7 for slides (I have Sensia 100, Provia 100F and K64...I know Andy Martin is a big K64 user) and between 0.7 and 1.0 for negatives...as recommended by the author.

The beauty of Vuescan is that with little or no tweaking you can get great results which were not possible with my supplied (Acer Scanwit 2720S) scanner software.

In all honesty, I have NO idea whether these settings will work as well with Vuescan 7 as they did with 6.6 which I was using until tonight - I'll let you know! The ONLY film I scan is Kodachrome 64, because that's all I shoot.

I don't think there can be such a thing as a "standard" Vuescan setting UNLESS you are remarkably consistent with your original exposures/film types. In general though I usually use "white balance" and gamma 1.8 - 2.2 (note negs and slides usually require different gammas). One thing I have found useful is experimentation with the "color space" - the extended gamut and BruceRGB settings have proved useful for me.

Just last night I was scanning some nightclub pics shot on 800ASA Fuji - my Coolscan III software couldn't make anything useful out of these, and neither could Vuescan using sRGB - but using extended gamut - fantastic!

As to lock ups - I've found the more recent versions of Vuescan (inc. the 7.0 beta) prone to lockup and system crashes if anything else is running during the scan. With version 6 I also had occassions where Vuescan failed to launch - this required complete system shutdown, power off and restart (PC & scanner) to clear - note if you're using a SCSI scanner, the scanner should power up before or along with the PC - never after!